I am a researcher/research director – social scientist, data scientist, community-engaged scholar, and administrator – with 20+ years of experience teaching, leading, and managing research and data science teams.

I work as the Director of Equitable Analysis in The Equity Center at the University of Virginia working with an amazing collection of scholars and practitioners, community experts, and students to create analysis and tools in support of a more just and equitable region. And I teach in the Batten School of Leadership in Public Policy, focusing on data ethics, public interest technology, and equitable policy.

I have been fortunate to engage in a wide variety of work – as a political science professor and quantitative scholar at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Virginia; as a data scientist engaged in applied work with the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service; as a consultant and leader creating UVA’s StatLab; as a library director building Research Data Services and the Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences; and as a researcher bridging applied and academic interests with community partners and advocates.

And I’ve been grateful to find many generous and creative partners along the way who’ve invited me to be part of collaborative work. Current partners include:

  • Community Policy, Analytics, and Strategy Lab (CommPAS), co-directing a community-oriented research initiative with Paul Martin in the Batten School of Public Policy and the UVA StatLab,
  • Public Interest Data Lab, leading a curricular lab in the Batten School of Public Policy designed to provide data science experience to students oriented towards justice,
  • The Global Policy Center’s Humanitarian Collaborative, working with David Leblang on on predictive analytics for humanitarian goals,

My own work centers on action-based research, using the tools of data science to promote accountable governance, make visible racial and other social inequities, and impact public policy and movement building. More importantly, I hope I’m mentoring the incredible young people I get to work with at UVA to engage this work early in their careers.

Also, sometimes I play the mandolin, pretend I’m learning to play the banjo, and harbor a dream of joining a home-grown bluegrass band!

CV/Resume

See a mostly complete CV And a brief resume
* html version * html version
* pdf version * pdf version

Community-Engaged Projects

Some examples of recent community-oriented projects, done as part of our CommPAS Lab and/or in partnership with the Equity Center.

Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas

  • The Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas project is a collaboration between the University of Virginia Library, the Equity Center, and the broader regional community to imagine and co-create a platform to combine, visualize, and make accessible data about local disparities.
  • Partially funded by an IMLS Community Catalyst grant

Cville Region COVID Equity and Recovery

  • In response to COVID, we began partnering with the UVA Global Policy Center to organize, visualize, and share data about COVID crisis response to inform equitable recovery. This was a rapid effort to provide easily accessible measures sought and shared by community organizations and members. We’re seeking to make accessible data to support all those working to improve lives, promote community resilience, create a more equitable processes, policies, and structures for our community.

Public Interest Data Lab

  • The Public Interest Data Lab is intended to provide data science experience to students in service of the public interest. We practice working collaboratively, openly, inclusively, and reproducibly.
  • We’ve generated a series of analyses and reports in partnership with Charlottesville’s Department of Social Services to examine racial and other disparities in the local child welfare ecosystem.

Charlottesville Policing: Temporary Detentions

  • Working with a local journalist with access to stop-and-frisk data from Charlottesville police acquired through FOIA requests by a local attorney, we built some visualizations to understand who police were detaining, where detentions occurred, and what reasons police provided.
  • Read the story we were supporting, Jordy Yager’s Determined to Be Free.

Charlottesville Region’s NGO Sector

  • An interactive resource to better understand the size, scope, and emphasis of our local NGO sector.

CommPAS Lab

  • More work from the Community, Policy, Analytics, and Strategy Lab, including:
  • Racial Identity in the Provision of Homelessness Services in the Charlottesville Continuum of Care, 2018 Report to City of Charlottesville’s Department of Social Services on Racial Disparities in the Child Welfare System, regional foundation grantors and grantees dasbhoard, and estimating regional energy inequity.

Research Projects

More academically-oriented projects.

Predictive Analytics for Humanitarian Goals

  • Working to build and evaluate models of displacement that can be of use in humanitarian response.
  • Part of UVA’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy’s Global Policy Center, in partnership with Save the Children, International.

Voices for Equity

  • An ongoing research effort to record decades of thoughtful and bold calls for racial equity written by students, faculty, and staff at the University of Virginia, to analyze them for common themes, and to create an interactive library to advance the conversation.
  • A collaboration between the UVA Equity Center and the President’s Racial Equity Task Force.

Project First Gen +

  • Re-imagining UVA as a place where first generation and lower income students thrive
  • Working with first-gen and low-income students to create research and knowledge for advocacy and change.

The Public Presidency Project

  • Developing new ways for the public to engage political news, one that allows people to monitor the activities and attentions of government from a relatively high level, that encourages the consumption of information from multiple and varied sources, and that lowers the barriers to attentive citizenship in ways that reduce inequalities in time, education, and access.
  • In other words, using machine learning to promote collective civic capacity. Here’s an early presentation: https://datafordemocracy.github.io/engagingnews/index.html

Presidential Campaigns

  • My book (University of Illinois Press 2011) examines how citizens learn and use accountability standards during presidential campaigns.
  • Additional peer-reviewed publications focus on repetition priming in campaigns (Journal of Politics 2008) and what citizens hear from campaign rhetoric (Political Communication 2012).

Citizen Participation

  • Investigating the causes and consequences of citizen participation in electoral systems.
  • Including research on how campaigns mobilize (Political Behavior 2012), congressional responsiveness to citizen participation (Legislative Studies Quarterly 2013), and how women’s political enagement is shaped by political structures.

Social Capital

  • Examining the production of social capital (Political Behavior 2000) and how social capital promotes policy accountability (Political Research Quarterly 2007).

Demographic Analysis

Workshops and Instruction

A few examples of workshops, instructional blog posts, and other projects and materials created as educational resources.

Analyis of UVA’s Ours to Shape Submissions

  • A multi-part example of text analysis in R
  • Examining the comments submitted to UVA’s new president’s Ours to Shape website.

PhD Plus: Data Science Essentials in R

  • We partnered with UVA’s new PhD Plus program to create a six-session series to build data analysis, wrangling, and visualization skills
  • And used the opportunity to dig deeper into Albemarle County Real Estate data as part of an ongoing partnership with the County.

RDS Workshops

  • Contributions to our UVA Library Data Workshop series
  • Including data wrangling, linear modeling, text as data (sentiment analysis, topic modeling, classification), survival analysis, matching methods, mulitiple imputation, cluster analysis, mixed-effects models

Library Projects

Projects done on behalf of library units and intiatives.

RDS Dashboard

  • A dashboard describing the work of the UVA Library’s Research Data Services and Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences teams.

Understanding Journal Use

  • To better understand usage patterns and costs of big deal journal packages, we’ve begun to analyze data on the number of articles downloaded from a given journal as well as metrics on the the number of articles published by UVA authors, the number of citations to a journal by UVA authors, and the the number of articles available via open-access.
  • Part of our prepration for the impending “big deal” negotiations.

Estimating Library Use with Network Logs

  • A pilot study using aggregated log data from wifi access points in library buildings to investigate the number of unique visitors to library spaces as well as the timing, duration, and characteristics of visitors.
  • And we’re using it now as background data in conversations about re-opening library spaces for the upcoming COVID fall.

Budget forecasting

  • Budget model forecasts to support library administration as we move to a responsibility-centered budget model.

DH Lightning talk: 2016 Presidential Debates